Thursday, July 24, 2014

Wild Style Breakbeats 7x7" Vinyl + Book from Kenny Dope

Described as "Kenny Dope revisits and edits the Wild Style soundtrack" - how good is that?

This includes 28 page book featuring new interviews and vintage photos from Wild Style archives. The Book doubles as a 7" vinyl holder ("Kay-Dee Casebook"). It features (7) 7" singles (13 songs total) featuring Kenny Dope edit versions from the Wild Style soundtrack.

ADDED: So what were the Wildstyle breakbeats? Here's the story [source]...

Kenny Dope: ”When it comes to “Wild Style”, it’s a movie that I have loved since I was a kid, because of what it stood for and how it showed real hip-hop culture to the world. As I became a producer in the late 1980s and into the 90s, when I listened close to the breakbeats that the DJs used in the film, I could tell that they were done in a studio....but I never knew the actual story behind them. It was always a mysterious thing, and no one seemed to know much about it.”

Wildstyle director Charlie Ahearn: “We didn't want to be dependent on the hit of the month but, more importantly, I was afraid of (filming) MCs rhyming off a pile of records that I wouldn't be able to clear”

And so, with a vision about the movie’s backbone: instrumentals that would replace breakbeats that DJs in New York were using at the time, Ahearn enlisted Fab 5 Freddy to oversee the production of material specifically for the film.

Freddy comments, “It was very smart on Charlie’s part...he said we should create our own, so I went and did that.” Using the “Orchestra” from the public access show “TV Party” (where Freddy was the camera man) original recordings were made for the film. That orchestra consisted of Leonardo “Lenny Ferrari” Ferraro on drums and Blondie’s Chris Stein.

Kenny Dope: “From an audio perspective, I got the 2 track mixdown tapes of the final breakbeats from Charlie. I went in and re-EQed everything and did re-edits, to make all of the originals-which were only about a minute each- longer. I didn’t want to put in anything that wasn’t there originally, so I didn’t add kicks or snares. I just wanted to enhance what they already had.”

The story of the breakbeats, the backbone of “Wild Style” has never been told so thoroughly and colorfully (in both words and glorious pictures) as you’ll find in this collection spearheaded by Kenny Dope. This is more than a collection of audio, this is documentation of an integral part of hip-hop history!

“Wild Style Breakbeats” not only features a 7” single including each of the breaks from the film, it also tells the story of those breakbeats in words and pictures. The 14 page hardcover book is written by Brian Coleman with reminiscences from Charlie Ahearn, DJ GrandWizzard Theodore, Fab 5 Freddie, Leonardo “Lenny Ferrari” Ferraro, Chris Stein and many more.